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Dear England, time to bury the spirit of the game
Invoking the spirit of the game at Lord’s is a feeble attempt to distract from the fact that Australia gained from the strictest interpretation of the law
Three years ago, a bunch of Australian cricketers were asked if they were okay with a bowler running out the non-striker. Mitchell Starc said ‘no’. As did Steve Smith, Alex Carey, Usman Khawaja and Josh Hazlewood who added a rider that a warning must precede it. “I’m leaning towards yes,” says Nathan Lyon in the video by cricket.com.au. And here’s Pat Cummins weighing in on the matter: “I used to be a no, but I’m starting to come around to a yes.”
Everyone is entitled to their interpretation of the spirit of the game. You might refuse to walk, claim a grassed catch, touch the boundary rope while saving a four, get in the way of a throw directed at the stumps, run out a batter who has tripped or deflect a throw that runs away to the boundary in the final of a World Cup. But there is, and will always be, only one interpretation of the law. It doesn’t matter if you like it or not, or whether you found it confusing, like in the case of Gill’s catch in the WTC final. At the end of the day, the law needs to be upheld in the strictest sense possible.
That is exactly what happened at Lord’s two days in a row. On Saturday, Starc seemed to have completed Ben Duckett’s catch before holding the ball groundwards while completing his slide. The law, however, deemed it not out. On Sunday, Jonny Bairstow wandered out of his crease after ducking under a Cameron Green bouncer with the assumption that it was the end of the over. But since Ahsan Raza had still not called ‘over’, it automatically validated Carey’s stumping appeal.
“I thought it was fair,” said Cummins when asked if he had considered withdrawing the appeal in the interest of cricket's spirit. “It's a really common thing for keepers to do, if you see a batter (who) keeps leaving his crease. I think Jonny did it a few balls beforehand, (so Carey) rolled it at the stumps, Jonny left his crease, then you're leaving the rest to the umpires. The conjecture was just whether ‘over’ had been called, but Ahsan (Raza) the umpire made it clear that he didn't say 'over'.”
Australia have been accused of tweaking the laws and interpreting the spirit of the game to apply it unilaterally for themselves, expecting the world to stand with them or be damned. But for a change, they were on the right side of the law. If at all, Australia played smarter cricket.
Ravichandran Ashwin, who has for long stood up to pseudo-moralists bent on overlooking the laws, thinks so. “We must get one fact loud and clear,” he tweeted. “The keeper would never have a dip at the stumps from that far out in a Test match unless he or his team have noticed a pattern of the batter leaving his crease after leaving a ball like Bairstow did.’ We must applaud the game smarts of the individual rather than skewing it towards unfair play or spirit of the game.”
The hue and cry from England, however, has been dramatic, if not duplicitous. Ben Stokes, while maintaining there was nothing unfair about the dismissal, asserted he wouldn’t take that path if the shoe was on the other foot. “If I was fielding captain at the time, I would have put a lot more pressure on the umpires to ask them what their decision was around the 'over' (call). Then I would have had a real think about the spirit of the game and would I want to potentially win a game with something like that happening? It would be no.”
It’s ironic Stokes said this at Lord’s, where four years ago England were awarded four overthrow runs after a throw from the deep deflected off his bat in the World Cup final against New Zealand. That game ultimately ended with a tied Super Over and England won by virtue of higher count of boundaries.
Stokes claims to have apologised to the Kiwis. There were reports of James Anderson alleging Stokes had asked the umpires to rescind—even though his request would have had no bearing—that boundary but the allrounder categorically denied it in the BBC podcast 'Tuffers and Vaughan' two weeks after the final. “Hand on heart, I did not go up to the umpires and say something like that.”
However noble Stokes’s intentions were, that it didn’t spur him to go up to the umpires tells you how the human mind tends to prioritise while trying to prise a first-ever World Cup.
But England have lost at Lord’s and are 0-2 down in this Ashes. Flawed as it was, England’s moral grandstanding takes a further beating when members of the MCC—the custodians of the game till even three decades ago—decide to abuse and heckle Australia for essentially courting and eliciting the strictest interpretation of the laws, most of which were compiled at Lord’s.
They consider it their birthright to remind everyone about playing the game in a gentlemanly manner, but won’t back away from sulking in the name of invoking the spirit of the game and calling the visitors ‘cheats’ if the tide isn’t in their favour. Like in the 70s, when England had accused the West Indies of endangering the game by bowling bouncers, this too seems a feeble attempt to change the narrative.
A week into a scathing independent report that details and lambasts English elitism and racial discrimination in cricket, it only confirms what we always knew but rarely said aloud—that the English made the rules but are not happy to play by them.
